The Manitou Page 9

  “God,” I said softly. “It’s grown enormous.”

  “And it’s getting bigger all the time,” said Dr. Hughes. “Come here, feel it.”

  I stepped cautiously up to the bedside. The tumor was so big that it was hard to believe it was actually part of the girl who lay under it, carrying it on her back like a sickening hump. I gingerly reached out with my fingertips and pressed it. It seemed firm and distended, but there was a sensation of something slithery inside. In fact, it felt exactly like the stomach of a pregnant woman.

  “Can’t you just kill it?” I asked Dr. Hughes. “It must be the size of a small child by now. Can’t you just stick a scalpel into it?”

  Dr. Hughes shook his head. “I wish I could. I’d like to chop it off with a meat cleaver, if you want to know the truth. But every X-ray shows that the nervous system of this creature is inextricably bound up with Karen’s nervous system. Any surgical attempt to remove it would kill her at once. They’re not so much like mother and child—they’re more like Siamese twins.”

  “Can she talk at all?”

  “She hasn’t said anything for several hours. We took her out of bed to weigh her this morning, and she spoke a couple of words then, but nothing that any of us could understand.”

  “You weighed her? Is she in a bad way?”

  Dr. Hughes tucked his hands in the pockets of his robe and looked sadly down at his dying patient. “She hasn’t lost any weight at all—but she hasn’t gained any either. Whatever this tumor is, it’s taking all its sustenance directly from her. Every ounce it grows, it takes from Karen.”

  “Have her parents been in touch?”

  “They came in this morning. The mother was very upset. I told them that we were going to try for an operation, but naturally I didn’t say anything about the medicine man stuff. They were angry enough at me as it was, because I hadn’t been able to operate already. If I’d started telling them about oldtime red Indians, they would have thought I was off my head.”

  I took one last look at Karen Tandy, lying white and silent under her sickening burden, and then we left the room and went back to Dr. Hughes’ office on the eighteenth floor.

  “Do you think her parents will be hard to convince? I asked him. “The problem is that all this is going to take money. We’re going to have to bribe the medicine man, and we’re going to have to pay for his plane fare and his hotel, not to mention what the hell might happen if he gets hurt in the battle. I’d love to help, but us clairvoyants are not exactly Rockefellers. I doubt if I could raise more than three or four hundred bucks.”

  Dr. Hughes looked glum. “I could get the money out of the hospital under normal circumstances, but I don’t see how I possibly can for the use of a medicine man. No, I think her parents have a right to know what’s going on, anyway, and make the choice for themselves. After all, the life of their daughter is at stake.”

  “Do you want me to talk to them?” I asked him.

  “You could, if you want to. They’re staying at Karen’s aunt’s place, on Eighty-second. If you get into any trouble, ask them to call me and confirm that you have my support.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Now, how about a drink?”

  “Good thinking,” said Dr. Hughes, and fetched out his bottle of bourbon. He poured out a couple of large ones, and I swallowed mine just as it came, fiery and revitalizing after a weary day’s drive to Albany and back. I sat back and Dr. Hughes offered me a cigarette.

  We smoked for a while in silence, then I said: “Dr. Hughes—”

  “Why don’t you call me Jack? This hospital’s pretty formal. It gives the patients confidence if they hear people being called ‘doctor’ all the time. But I don’t think that’s the kind of confidence you need.”

  “Okay, Jack. I’m Harry.”

  “That’s better. Nice to know you, Harry.”

  I swallowed some more bourbon. “Jack,” I said, “have you stopped to consider exactly what we’re doing here and why we’re doing it? I don’t know Karen Tandy much better than I know you. I just sometimes think, what the hell am I doing driving to Albany and back for someone I don’t even know.”

  Jack Hughes grinned. “Don’t you think that isn’t a question that everybody who helps other people ask themselves? I ask myself that question ten times a day. When you’re a doctor of medicine, you’re taken for granted. People come to you when they’re sick, and think you’re terrific, but as soon as they’re well again, you cease to be interesting. Some patients are grateful. I get Christmas cards every year from some of them. But most of them wouldn’t even recognize me if I bumped into them on the street.”

  “I guess you’re right,” I said.

  “I know I’m right,” replied Jack. “But I think this case is something different. I’m not interested in this case for the usual reasons. The way I see it, this thing that’s growing in Karen Tandy represents a whole medical and cultural problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jack Hughes stood up and came over to sit on the edge of his desk right next to me.

  “Look at it this way,” he said. “The fascinating thing about America is that it was always supposed to be a brand new nation, free of oppression and free of guilt. But from the moment the white man settled here, there was a built-in time bomb of guilt. In the Declaration of Independence, there is even an attempt to gloss over this guilt, you remember? Jefferson wrote about the ‘merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.’ Right from the beginning, the Indian has not counted as an individual who is endowed by his Creator with those certain inalienable rights.

  “Gradually, the guilt of what we did to the Indians has eroded our sense of owning and belonging to our own country. This isn’t our land, Harry. This is the land we stole. We make jokes about Peter Minuit buying Manhattan Island for twenty-four dollars. But, these days, that kind of deal would be considered a theft, an out-and-out con. Then there’s all this business about Wounded Knee, and every other Indian massacre. We’re guilty, Harry. There’s nothing we could or should do about the past, but we’re still guilty.”

  I had never heard Jack Hughes speaking so eloquently. I watched him drag at his cigarette and brush some ash from his crumpled pants.

  “That’s why this case is so interesting—and so frightening,” he said. “If it’s really true, this whole medicine man bit, then for the first time ever, white men with a fully developed sense of guilt are going to come into contact with a red man from the earliest days of our settlement. Today, we think about Indians in a totally different way. Back in the seventeenth century, they were savages and they were standing in the way of our need for land and our greed for material wealth. These days, now we have everything we want, we can afford to be softer and more tolerant. I know we’ve all been talking about destroying this medicine man, and fighting him, but don’t you feel some sympathy for him as well?”

  I stubbed out my cigarette. “I feel some sympathy for Karen Tandy.”

  “Yes,” said Jack, “of course you do. She’s our patient, and her life is in terrible danger. We can’t forget that. But don’t you feel anything for this savage from the past?”

  In a strange way, Jack Hughes was right. I did feel something. There was a tiny part of my brain that wanted him to survive. If there was a way in which both Karen Tandy and the medicine man could live, then that would be the way I would choose. I was frightened of him, I was terrified of his powers and his mastery of the occult, but at the same time he was like a mythical hero of legend, and to destroy him would mean destroying something of America’s heritage. He was a lone survivor from our country’s shameful past, and to kill him would be like grinding out the last spark of the spirit that had given the United States such a colorful and mystical background. He was the last representative of original American magic.

  Just then, the telephone bleeped. Jack Hughes picked it up, and said: “Hughes.”

  Someone
was speaking very excitedly on the other end. Jack Hughes frowned and nodded, and said: “When? Are you sure? Well, have you tried forcing it? What do you mean, you can’t?”

  Finally, he laid the receiver down.

  “Is anything wrong?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s Karen. McEvoy says they can’t get the door open. There’s something going on in her room, and they can’t get the door open.”

  We left the office and rushed down the corridor to the elevator. There were two nurses in there with a trolleyful of bottles and kidney bowls and we wasted precious seconds while they maneuvered it out of the way. We got in, pressed the button for ten, and sank downwards.

  “What the hell do you think has happened?” I asked Jack tersely.

  He shook his head. “Who knows?”

  “I just hope to God that medicine man isn’t able to use his powers already,” I said. “If he can, we’re totally sunk.”

  “I don’t know,” replied Jack Hughes. “Come on, we’re here.”

  The elevator doors hissed open, and we ran swiftly down the corridor to Karen Tandy’s room. Dr. McEvoy was standing outside with two male nurses and Selena, the radiologist.

  “What’s happened?” snapped Jack.

  “She was left alone for less than a couple of seconds,” explained Dr. McEvoy. “The nurses were changing over their duty. When Michael here tried to get back in, he couldn’t open the door. And look.”

  We peered into Karen Tandy’s room through the glass panel in the door. I was shocked to see that she was no longer lying in bed. The sheets and blankets were rumpled and pushed aside.

  “There,” whispered Jack. “In the corner.”

  I angled my head and saw Karen Tandy standing at the far corner of the room. Her face was horribly white, and her lips were drawn back over her teeth in a stretched and grotesque grin. She was leaning forward under the weight of the huge distended bulge on her back, and her long white hospital nightgown was torn away from her shoulders, revealing her shrunken breasts and prominent ribs.

  “Good God,” said Jack, “she’s dancing."

  He was right. She was hopping slowly from foot to foot, in the same slow silent waltz that Mrs. Herz had been dancing. It seemed as if she were skipping to a soundless drum, a noiseless flute.

  “We have to break in there,” ordered Jack. “She could kill herself, running about like that.”

  “Michael, Wolf,” said Dr. McEvoy to the two male nurses. “Do you think you can get your shoulders to the door?”

  “We’ll try, sir,” said Wolf, a burly young German with a dark crew cut. “I’m sorry about this, sir, I didn’t realize.”

  “Just get the door down,” said Jack.

  The two nurses stood back a yard or two, and then rushed at the door together. It splintered and cracked, and the glass broke. A strange cold draught, like the draught that had blown during our seance in Mrs. Karmann’s apartment, flowed icily from the jagged hole.

  “Again,” said Jack.

  Michael and Wolf stepped back again, and smashed against the door once again. This time, they wrenched it right off its hinges, and it twisted open. Dr. Hughes stepped in and went straight up to Karen, where she was bobbing and hopping on the rug. The great swollen hunch on her back was wobbling and jiggling with every step. It looked so obscene I felt sick.

  “Come on, Karen,” said Jack Hughes soothingly. “Back into bed now.”

  Karen turned on one bare foot and stared at him. Again, they were not her eyes. They looked fierce and bloodshot and powerful.

  Jack Hughes came toward her with his hands held out. She backed away from him slowly, with the same glare of hatred in her eyes. The hump on her back twisted and squirmed, like a sheep imprisoned in a sack.

  “He—says—you—must—not—” she said haltingly in her own voice.

  Dr. Hughes stopped. “He says I must not what, Karen?”

  She licked her lips. “He—says—you—must—not—touch—him.”

  “But Karen,” said Dr. Hughes. “If we don’t look after you, he will not survive either. We are doing our best for both of you. We respect him. We want him to live.”

  She backed further away, knocking a tray of instruments on to the floor.

  “He—does—not—believe—you.”

  “But why not, Karen? Haven’t we done everything we can to help? We’re not soldiers, or warriors. We are medicine men, like himself. We want to help him.”

  “He—is—in—pain.”

  “In pain? Why?”

  “It hurts—him. He—is—hurt.”

  “Why is he hurt? What hurt him?”

  “He—does—not—know. He—is—hurt. It was—the light.”

  “The light? What light?”

  “He—will—kill—you—all—”

  Karen suddenly started swaying. Then she screamed, and screamed, and dropped to her knees, clawing and clutching at her back. Michael and Wolf rushed up to her, and carried her swiftly back to bed. Jack Hughes fixed a hypodermic of tranquilizer, and shot it without hesitation into Karen’s arm. Gradually, her cries diminished, and she sank into a nervous sleep, twitching and shaking and flickering her eyes.

  “That settles it,” said Dr. Hughes.

  “Settles what, Jack?” I asked him.

  “You and I are going straight to her parents and we’re going to tell them exactly what’s wrong. We’re going to get that medicine man in from South Dakota and we’re going to fight that beast until he’s dead.”

  “No guilt?” I asked. “No sympathy?”

  “Of course I have guilt, and I have sympathy, too. And it’s because I have sympathy that I’m going to get it done.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Harry,” said Jack, “that medicine man is in pain. He didn’t know why, but he said it was the light. If you know anything about gynecology, you’ll know why we never X-ray fetuses unless we believe they are already dead, or they’re a threat to their mother’s lives. Every time a human being is X-rayed, the rays destroy cells in the area where the X-ray is directed. In an adult, that isn’t too important, because they’re fully developed, and the loss of a few cells isn’t harmful. But in a tiny fetus, one cell destroyed can mean that a finger or a toe or even an arm or a leg will never develop.”

  I stared at him. “Do you mean that—”

  “I simply mean that we’ve poured enough X-rays into that medicine man to see through Fort Knox on a foggy day.”

  I looked down at the vein-laced bulge that squirmed on Karen Tandy’s back. “In other words,” I said, “he’s a monster. We’ve deformed him.”

  Jack Hughes nodded. Outside, it was snowing again.

  Chapter Five

  Down in the Gloom

  I don’t know what I expected a modern-day medicine man to look like, but Singing Rock could just as well have been an insurance salesman as a practitioner of ancient Indian magic. When I met him the next morning at La Guardia after his arrival from Sioux Falls, he was wearing a glossy gray mohair suit, his hair was short and shiny with oil, and there were heavy-rim spectacles on his less-than-hawklike nose.

  He was dark-skinned, with black glittering eyes, and there were more wrinkles on his fifty-year-old face than you would expect on a white man, but otherwise he was as mundane and unspectacular as all the other businessmen on the flight.

  I walked over to him and shook his hand. He only came up to my shoulder.

  “Mr. Singing Rock? My name’s Harry Erskine.”

  “Oh, hi. You don’t have to call me Mr. Singing Rock. Singing Rock on its own is okay. Was that a terrible flight? We had blizzards all the way. I thought we were going to have to put down in Milwaukee.”

  “My car’s outside,” I told him.

  We collected his baggage and made our way to the car park. A watery sun was melting the slush, and there were the beginnings of a spring-like feeling around. A row of drips splashed on to the sidewalk from the terminus building, and one of them caught me on
the neck.

  I looked up. “How come they don’t hit you?” I asked.

  “I’m a medicine man,” said Singing Rock urbanely. “You think a drop of water would dare to hit me?”

  I stowed his cases in the trunk, and we climbed into the car.

  “Do you like the Cougar?” asked Singing Rock.

  “It’s pretty neat,” I said. “I like it.”

  “I have a green one,” he told me. “I use it for fishing weekends. For work, I have a Marquis.”

  “Oh,” I said. It didn’t sound as though the medicine business was too bad down on the reservation these days.

  As we drove out of La Guardia toward Manhattan, I asked Singing Rock how much he knew about the Karen Tandy case.

  “I was told that some ancient medicine man was about to make a reappearance inside her body,” he said.

  “And you don’t find that hard to believe?”

  “Why should I ... I’ve seen stranger things than that. Learning to escape into another time is pretty strong medicine, but there have been recorded cases of it happening. If you say it’s true, and Dr. Snow says it’s true, then I’m inclined to believe that it’s true.”

  “You know this has got to be kept a strict secret?” I asked him, overtaking a truck, and switching on my windshield wipers to dear away the spray thrown up by its wheels.

  “Of course. I wouldn’t want to publicize it anyway. I have a steady investment business back in South Dakota, and I wouldn’t want my clients to think I was reverting back to savagery.”

  “You also know that this medicine man is extremely powerful?”

  Singing Rock nodded. “Any medicine man who can project himself through three centuries has got to be very powerful. I’ve been looking up the whole subject, and it appears that the greater the time span the medicine man is able to cross, the more powerful his magic can be.”